Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.’ New YorkerAn extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.‘These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.’ Andrew McMillan Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the YearPBS Summer Recommendation

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Fiction, Contemporary, Adult, Asian Literature

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 5, 2016

About the author

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the American Book Award and the MacArthur “Genius Grant," he has also worked as a line cook, tobacco harvester, nursing home volunteer, and fast-food server, the latter becoming inspiration for The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City.

Reviews

[chai ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fact that Ocean Vuong can lay me out and then undo me with his words alone is entirely too much power for one poet. I've read and re-read the poems in this collection so many times there are lines I can recall clear as day, and each time, I am incapacitated by them anew. Vuong writes like his heart is hanging wide open on its hinges. His sincerity is so disarming, and the way he hammers pain (both personal and historical) out of language is nothing short of extraordinary. This is the kind of poetry collection that settles into you and becomes like breathing. Brilliant, gorgeous, heart-deep, and utterly unforgettable.

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely lovely book of poems. Nearly every poem ended in a way that left me saying "mmmmm" with pleasure or admiration or the quiet of feeling stunned by such beautiful words.

[Larry H · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed, & remember
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

To read Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds is to be dazzled by gorgeous lyricism. I picked this up as part of my exploration of contemporary poetry I have been experimenting with over the last several weeks. It's amazing the breadth of talent that exists in this genre.

I realized after reading the first few sentences of Vuong's first poem just how talented he is. It certainly explains why this book won the 2016 Whiting Award and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, because some of his stanzas simply took my breath away.

Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.

Vuong spent the first two years of his life living in a refugee camp, and he never knew his father. This sense of emptiness is palpable through many of the 35 poems in this collection, as Vuong imagines reasons why his father wasn't part of his life. He imagines his father meeting violent or tragic, accidental ends, or even being imprisoned. In several poems, he imagines encounters with his father at various stages of his life.

Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair

through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase.

Some of the poems touch on mythological themes, some touch on more realistic, violent ones, exploring the experience of Vietnamese refugees. One poem, "Aubade with Burning City," is based on the fact that Armed Forces Radio played the song "White Christmas" as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon in 1975. The poem juxtaposes verse with lyric fragments from the song, to beautiful effect.

The more poetry I've been reading, the more I realize that just as I prefer "traditional" short stories over those which take more experimental forms and narratives, I feel the same way about poetry. At times, Vuong experiments with form, language, even writes a poem using footnotes, and those poems didn't work for me.

In the end, however, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is at times contemplative, fiery, even erotic. Vuong's power lies in his words, and the emotions he conveys through them. While poetry doesn't get the type of recognition fiction and other genres get, Vuong definitely deserves to be heralded as an artist for our time.

See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com, or check out my list of the best books I read in 2017 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2017.html.

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes poetry so gorgeous are often the ways it overcomes you by surprise. Lines burst out from unexpected angles of emotional insight, language becomes malleable and adapts surprising shapes, a poem arrives at an unforeseen destination, and the astonishing resonance from a pairing of words can leave you staggering in beauty. I also find with poetry a uniqueness that you can never tell what will be your favorite poems until far later. A poem may strike you deeply in the moment but I’m often surprised to see which ones linger long in the heart, which ones you turn to in times of need, which grow roots into your soul so that their lines become aphorisms that alway appear in the mind like a mantra or a prayer. Ocean Vuong’s debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a volume of poetry that has remained deeply nestled in my heart and one I frequently return to. Accessible and highly quotable without sacrificing depth, the poems in this collection have a lasting power as Vuong crafts words like ancient gods of old crafting the cosmos. These poems are ablaze in emotion as Vuong’s luminous language and imagery shine on themes of desire, family, violence, self-acceptance among others in this impressive debut that may not be without its faults but, nearly a decade later, it certainly deserves to stand tall in the hallowed history of poetry.

Dear God, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through
to get here.
Here. That's all I wanted to be.

This is such a crisp yet bountiful collection of poetry that showcases the magnificent possibilities of language to access and honor the past or oneself, and cast words into the hearts of others to share the beauty of existence and the emotions we pass through. This is such a highly quotable collection with imagery that really bursts with vivid, poetic intensity. Take the snow in Devotion for instance:

Fresh snow
crackling on the window,
each flake a letter
from an alphabet
I've shut out for good.

Ideas of language are omnipresent in these poems. Vuong, who was born in Saigon and moved to the US, credits literature for his learning to speak and read, often referencing the works of poet Frank O'Hara as a teacher of sorts. He has a lovely and inimitable style. As Daniel Wegner wrote in a profile on Vuong for the New Yorker:

‘His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.’

One of my favorites in the collection is indebted to O’Hara, with “after Frank O’Hara” credited after the title. Many of my favorite lines come from this poem, many I quote often and are never far from my mind. So here it is in it’s entirely:

Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls.
Here's the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red trip wire.
Don't worry. Just call it horizon
& you'll never reach it.
Here's today. Jump. I promise it's not
a lifeboat. Here's the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty out of.
Don't be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean —
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here's
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here's a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here's a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake —
& mistake these walls
for skin.

This is such a marvelous collection and I love it so much. There are such great lines about desire such as ‘Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? Queer love rings out so proudly yet aware of the dangers of being out and open in a culture that is less than welcoming and violence and desire often come paired in the imagery. There is a glorious transcendence of emotion in these poems that often borders on the epic—many poem titles channel greek mythology to further this effect—and one cannot help but be overtaken by the imagery.

O minute hand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season.
(from A little closer to the edge)

Violence is never far from this collection. There are reflections of war that tore apart his family back home and also the violence from an abusive father. His parents find their ways into many of these poems, and once again we often see how expressions of love come hand in hand with images of violence such as in A Little Closer to the Edge:

Young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand in hand,
into the bomb crater.

Family is very central in this collection as well as his larger reach of work across now two volumes of poetry and one novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a fantastic and poetic book that focuses primarily on his mother. The title for the novel is taken from a poem in this collection, another favorite of mine, that contains such startling lines like:

‘Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
It cannot keep.’

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds is a marvelous debut and a collection of poems that has certainly stuck with me. There are lines here that are always at hand in my mind. I always know I like a poem when I feel compelled to do a painting with it:

[Image: poem with lines from Into the Breach]
     I want to leave
     no one behind
to keep
& be kept
     the way a field
     turns its secrets
into peonies
     the way light
     keeps its shadow
by swallowing it

So do yourself a favor and check out Night Sky With Exit Wounds. It is a lovely collection and began an already impressive career from Ocean Vuong. It is also probably my favorite of all his works. I hope some of these lines can become a comfort that sticks by you as well as they have for me.

5/5

Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.

[may ➹]

I just don’t know / how to love a man / gently. Tenderness / a thing to be beaten / into.

This is a book best read slowly, out loud, in your bed during the late hours of night when nothing feels real. What a beautiful collection of poems focusing on themes ranging from immigration, the body, family, and war, each word painting a careful image that slices into you. Some of what Vuong wrote may have gone over my head, but the things he made me feel... I had so many visceral reactions throughout the book where his words genuinely made me shudder.

I’m not rating this, but know that I loved it and fully recommend it. Take your time with it, not only because you will be overwhelmed by each poem (in the best way), but also to let everything sink into you and pull at your heart. You’ll come into this book as one person and leave it as another, fuller version of yourself.

[Lala BooksandLala · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading vlog https://youtu.be/eZJy7D_2HmQ
join the buzzword readathon https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a book of poetry with an amazing title by an author who wrote an amazing debut novel, and in my opinion it doesn't quite live up to either!

but i'm no poetry expert, so i'm going to leave it at that.

------------

reading books by asian authors for aapi month!

book 1: kim jiyoung, born 1982
book 2: siren queen
book 3: the heart principle
book 4: n.p.
book 5: the hole
book 6: set on you
book 7: disorientation
book 8: parade
book 9: if i had your face
book 10: joan is okay
book 11: strange weather in tokyo
book 12: sarong party girls
book 13: the wind-up bird chronicle
book 14: portrait of a thief
book 15: sophie go's lonely hearts club
book 16: chemistry
book 17: heaven
book 18: the atlas six
book 19: the remains of the day
book 20: is everyone hanging out without me? and other concerns
book 21: why not me?
book 22: when the tiger came down the mountain
book 23: the lies we tell
book 24: to paradise
book 25: pachinko
book 26: you are eating an orange. you are naked.
book 27: cursed bunny
book 28: almond
book 29: a tiny upward shove
book 30: ms ice sandwich
book 31: the woman in the library
book 32: nothing like i imagined
book 33: night sky with exit wounds

------------------------
tbr review

i cannot believe i'm signing up to read poetry voluntarily.

i think ocean vuong broke my brain.

[persephone ☾ · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is the reason why i will not give up on reading contemporary poetry.
i cried not only because of the sadness that quite clearly radiates from this book but also for the beauty of it all, for the poetic metaphors that felt divinely nostalgic, for the descriptions that felt so vivid yet incredibly soft and for the hope that some poems still managed to convey despite the terrible events that were recounted.

[Steven Critelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notwithstanding his youth, by the time Night Sky with Exit Wounds was published in early 2016, Ocean Vuong was already well-known as a exciting new poet, with poems in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, The Poetry Review and other prominent poetry journals. So it was with much anticipation that I read this book. I regrettably say I was disappointed, partly because I expected a lot more in the way of a wunderkind's talent, with poetry that was as sophisticated as it was effusively expressive. Too many poems fall within a class that meets Terry Eagleton's characterization of Dylan Thomas's "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," in which "an elaborateness of form conceals a paucity of content." Perhaps, Thomas's work is a fitting parallel, where his word music and emotion often outstripped the ideas that eventually drowned in the poem. The best poetry informs, opens vistas on the way we perceive ourselves. Thomas wrote some remarkable poems, but Thomas's reputation has dimmed considerably for the very faults to which Vuong falls prey.

As an initial observation, Vuong’s linguistic choices sometimes confused me. "Threshold" begins: "In the body, where everything has a price/I was a beggar." This sentence, as the poem later bears out, requires a broadly metaphoric construction, one not limited to the "body" as corpus, but rather to the effect of "in a life, where everything has its price," and where "beggar" is indicative of the absence of something essential, which in this case is not monetary at all. At the poem's conclusion, however, we find the "price" trope leveraged as a word game ("I didn’t know the cost/of entering a song – was to lose/your way back" [my italics]), which diminishes its aesthetic effect and frustrates the expectations aroused by the poem's introductory line. I also had difficulty with the poem's only simile, an awkward and perplexing figure: "His voice—//it filled me to the core/like a skeleton" (my italics). One cannot easily shrug the morbidity of "skeleton," but even more to the point, the comparison is inept; a skeleton doesn't "fill" a body. The sense, I believe, is that the father's voice provided something that was elementally missing from the son's life; although, as we later learn, the father was mainly notable for his willful absence, and so it is difficult for the reader to make the emotional connection that Vuong evidently feels. In this and more than a few other poems, Vuong betrays a cognitive dissonance where the art either forces us to cross a bridge too far or collapses under its own weight.

"Threshold" serves as a preamble that sets the tone for the rest of the book. It figures the poet, as a child, on his knees and looking through the keyhole of the bathroom door as his father sings in the shower. His submissiveness is practiced in order to gain access to his father’s inner life and, as we learn in later poems, to make the mythic connection between his "Telemachus" (the title of the following poem) and his father’s "Odysseus." Though, in poems like "Telemachus," "Odysseus Redux," "Eurydice," "Trojan" and others, Vuong's narrative persona takes on an air of grandiosity. If this were theater, it would come off as a serious case of overacting:

                        Back from the wind, he called to me
              with a mouthful of crickets-

                                smoke & jasmine rising
from his hair. I waited

                        for the night to wane
              into decades-before reaching

for his hands. Then we danced

              without knowing it: my shadow
                                deepening his on the shag.
("Odysseus Redux")

This has the miasma of T.S. Eliot's orotund Tiresias. The risk of this epic association with classic myth today, however, is that it acts as a foil to contemporary existence, as Jean-François Lyotard argued. If used seriously, as it was until the mid-20th century, one must retreat to the notion that grand narratives universally speak to us, despite the fact that our diverse orientations, perspectives, desires and needs say otherwise. But the real reason for treating classic Greek, Latin and Hebrew myth as a disability is, of course, that the old myths are as dead as the languages that first contained them, and contemporary readers who are not scholars cannot be expected to understand their purpose in a given poem. It would have been more interesting if Vuong had exploited Vietnamese myth and folklore, rather than the old Greek tales with all their Freudian baggage. Indeed, when Vuong brings the Vietnam war into a number of poems (such as "A Little Closer to the Edge," "Aubade for Burning City" and "Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds"), it admirably serves as the field upon which the vital myth of family can freely stir the blood of Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

As a rule, Vuong tries too hard to make his conceits startling. He turns tricks with enjambments three too many times and introduces metaphors and symbols that don't seem to serve a purpose other than for shock effect. For Vuong no intensification of the image is enough, with shatterings, cracks, swellings, gasps, breakings and trauma galore, in turn made even more so by the replete introductions of bones, bullets, bombs, feculence, ordure, sex and death. The senses are heavily assaulted in poem after poem, and one wonders whether the gentle reader, at some point, will give up on Vuong's pretensions and perforce accept the poetry as surreal projections of a mind needy for attention.

Further, Vuong lets no conceit rest on his laurels, but he must extend it to the breaking point as in, for example, "Devotion":

Because the difference
        between prayer & mercy
is how you move
        the tongue. I press mine
to the navel's familiar
        whorl, molasses threads
descending toward
        devotion. & there's nothing
more holy than holding
        a man's heartbeat between
your teeth, sharpened
        with too much
air.

While the conceit (the purported difference between "prayer and mercy" in the motion of the tongue) is flawed from inception, as a practical matter of versification, the last phrase, "sharpened with too much air," adds little to the expression and dulls the pointed combination of sexuality with the poetic by pushing the conceit "too much." This happens in many other poems, where figurations are overburdened and force the tropes from sense into nonsense.

We observe this fault clearly in his "Ode to Masturbation," a catalogue of one over-the-top trope after another, with the mixed effect of exhilarating images and ideas that repeatedly lose their way:

you whose name
        not heard
by the ear
        but the smallest
bones
        in the graves you

who ignite the april air
        with all your petals'
here here here you
        who twist
through barbed
        -wired light

despite knowing
        how color beckons
decapitation . . .

The transitions are vacant intensifications, for Vuong uses words to arouse the reader's emotions and nothing else. So we have phrases like "sanford towns/whose trees know/the weight of history/can bend their branches/to breaking//lines whose roots burrow/through stones and hard facts,” essentially an aleatory run-on of ideas that provide a surplus of "special effects" to make a blockbuster out of a poem with too little to say. The poem fails most notably in its conclusion:

don't
        be afraid
to be this
        luminous
to be so bright so
        empty

the bullets pass
        right through you
thinking
        they have found
the sky as you reach
        down press

a hand
        to this blood
-warm body
        like a word
being nailed
        to its meaning

& lives

Because of their conjunction here, the words "bright" and "empty" lose their compass; the phrase "bullets pass/right through you/thinking/they have found/the sky," which ingenuously ascribes sentience to the inanimate (a Romantic affectation), makes "bullets" cartoonish and "sky" virtually nonexistent; and the awe the poet intends to instill with the last trope is flat-footed, as Vuong, one more time, exhausts Christian myth as metaphor (in a poem purportedly about masturbation). Yet, it is the vain mortgaging of all that was invested to bring us to this point in the poem, which Vuong then cheaply rolls into a simple grammatical trope, that bathetically reduces its value to nil. Here masturbation becomes just another metaphor for logorrhea.

Certainly Vuong's main fault is that he makes problematic choices because he overwrites. In "The Smallest Measure," he portrays a father teaching his son to hunt, drawing forth the boy's sympathetic response to the hunted doe, which does double duty as the poet's alter ego in bloated language:

                Heavy with summer, I
am the doe whose one hoof cocks
                                like a question ready to open

                roots. & like any god
-forsaken thing, I want nothing more
                                than my breaths. To lift

                this snout, carved
from centuries of hunger, toward the next
                                low peach bruising

                in the season's clutch.

One might casually overlook Vuong's self-indulgence in caricature with phrases like "Heavy with summer," "any god-forsaken thing" and "snout, carved/ from centuries of hunger," as well as the now customary Vuong signature of trauma in "low peach bruising//in the season's clutch" (describing the maturing peach). Vuong's device here is to make the poem from the doe's POV, endowing it not only with a poetic sensibility, but with omniscience as well. The matter is further complicated by the following lines:

                Once I came near
enough to a man to smell
                                a woman's scent

                in his quiet praying-
as some will do before raising
                                their weapons closer

                to the sky.

The "woman's scent" in the "quiet praying" of the man could be a reference to the traditional hunt-seduction metaphor, or alternatively, a comment about sensitivity, empathy and even squeamishness (which is traditionally and unfairly made a female trait). Traditionally, if there is any praying in hunting, it is a prayer that God bless the hunter with success which, in turn, will please a woman who expects food on her table. This brings us back to the other side of the seduction metaphor. How the doe should sense the prayer from a women's scent or its relationship to hunting is as problematic as the doe POV, which unnecessarily complicates the poet's relationship to the material and makes us suspect the whole poem as metaphor, one adverse to the poem's professed theme.

When the boy cannot bring himself to pull the trigger and weeps, the father's understanding and gentleness is portrayed to great effect, as he takes the gun away from the boy and touches the boy's head with his own:

                                                  I see

                an orange cap touching
an orange cap. No, a man
                                bending over his son

                the way the hunted,
for centuries, must bend
                                over its own reflection

                to drink.

The problem, however, is that the pathos in the gesture between father and son has been compromised by the comparison with that of the hunted animal drinking: one act is a matter of compassionate choice, the other an ordinary necessity of life. The Romantic strain in Vuong poetry elevates the natural scene of a doe drinking to a significance that in unearned and unduly presumptive. The manner and not the substance of the act is made to govern the simile. Also, the hunter is compared to the hunted (again, in the doe's mind) so that it distorts the tenor and vehicle relationship, the net effect of which renders it mawkish, giving it the character of a Disney cartoon rather than reveal a poetic truth. Even more disconcerting, the whiff of a sexual subtext that Vuong has subtly implied, whether consciously or unconsciously, runs at cross purposes with the theme of the poem, which is ostensibly about the emotional relationship between a father and son (one of the main discourses of the book).

These are just a few illustrations that reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the textual effect of the writing, where similes, metaphors and symbols are routinely overtaxed to weaken rather than strengthen the poetry, all too frequently going beyond what is clearly sufficient and adding the extra brick that topples the wall.

Lastly, a note about the book's rhetorical style as it relates to the poet's credibility. Vuong describes his family history in graphically detailed and unequivocally melodramatic terms, and, as discussed above, drawn Greek myth into the mix. Though he was not born at the time when the Vietnam war events occurred, the journey that brought his family to the U.S. is depicted as nothing less than Promethean with Hollywood-style highlights (e.g., his parents make love in a bomb crater). The portrayals are vivid and affecting, and Vuong's poetry is luminous even as the subject matter is lurid and unsettling. But one questions the epic character of the underlying events, which Vuong could not have personally witnessed, just as one naturally questions his psychic impersonation of Jacqueline Kennedy ("Of Thee I Sing") at one of the most traumatic and intimately reported events in American history, viz., the assassination of her husband, the U.S. president, in 1963. I think it was a mistake to include "Of Thee I Sing" in this volume because the assassination, even absent reference to it, relates to the Vietnam war. One may rightly dismiss Vuong's quixotic projection into Jackie Kennedy's soul as pure camp, but if that occurs then the authenticity of his family portraits is suspect.

In the end I found the technical difficulties in narrative and figuration, as well as Vuong's melodramatic style, frustrating my attempts to enjoy many of the poems. These are common faults in young poets, even those who display exceptional talent, as Vuong. However, this debut falls woefully short of others I have read in the last year, particularly Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade and Andrew McMillan's Physical. Admittedly, those poets seem to me more self-aware about what is happening on the page. I'm not sure Vuong understands the aesthetic nature of his work yet. He's got poetry in his blood, no doubt, and I suspect that he will assert more control over his material as time goes on. Certainly, he's quite capable of renderings that can touch a raw nerve in the reader's cortex. His future success will depend upon a maturation that moves beyond the special effects. Thus, despite my overall opinion of this book (which, I acknowledge, runs against the grain of overwhelming public acclamation), there are some very good poems here that any poet would envy. Whether or not you are receptive to Vuong's charms, the book should be read, for its failures as much as for its successes.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

From poems about heritage, trauma and refugee status in the first part of the bundle to love reflections in the second part, and a bit more thematically unclear final part
Don’t we touch each other to prove we are still here? - On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

Section I
Harrowing connections between the fall of Saigon and the fall of Troy kick off this collection:

As if dancing could stop the heart of his murderer from beating between his ribs. - Trojan

In the square below: a nun on fire,
rubs silently toward her god - - Aubade with a burning city

But also desire is eloquently captured, as one can imagine from reading the debut novel from Ocean Vuong:

O minute hand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. - A little closer to the edge

Immigrant Haibun is more of a prose poem, about being a refugee on a raft, turned magical and beautiful evocative. The experience of fleeing, being a refugee, come back in quite a lot of poems.
Interesting, contrasting with the prominent place the mom has in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, in Night Sky with Exit Wounds the father plays a major role:

There’s a lighthouse / some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don’t know / desire other than the need to be shattered & rebuilt - My father writes from prison

or
My son, tell them
the body is a blade that sharpens
by cutting. - Headfirst

What is also apparent is how the bundle brings with it very innovative use of page. Almost all poems are different in usage of the white to convey rhythms and patterns.

Section II
Seventh circle of earth is hartbreaking, about a gay couple dying in flames in Texas
And then we have the later title for the novel of Ocean:

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
it cannot keep. - On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

Love is not idealised or made perfect, love hurts in these poems even if it is perhaps worth it:
Silly me. I thought love was real
& the body imaginary. - Eurydice

Section III
The third section is more difficult to define, with violence and guns recurring often, red and black and loss of loved ones, the relationship with oneself and one’s childhood.
It’s more diffuse and less visceral in a way, with longer, but also for me less impactful poems.

I think if it was just the first two sections I would have rated this collection 5 stars, but now I feel it is around 3.5 stars. Still this last poem I want to quote is very much untrue in title, since in a sense I already love Vuong’s sense of language and his structurally daring in his poems:
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live longer
& failing.

& remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. - Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong

[lisa ★ · Rating 5 out of 5]

it is entirely preposterous for a single poet to hold this much power over me, thank you ocean vuong *wheezing from tears*

[Boustrophedon · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the first full-length collection by Ocean Vuong, a rather thoughtless writer who is careless with words and who has never crossed a pathos he didn't immediately take. Voung has a second-rate imagination that never goes beyond his favorite subject, which is Vuong (see his New Yorker poem, "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong," which is literally addressed to himself, as an example). Page after page exhibits poor writing: in "Prayer for the Newly Damned" he writes "what becomes of the shepherds/ when the sheep are cannibals?" Nothing happens to the shepherds when the sheep are cannibals; the word he meant to use but did not is "carnivorous" or "carnivores." Patterns emerge. Vuong chooses words with as much accuracy as a blindfolded child pinning a tail on a donkey. Take a recent poem of his not in this collection, "Tell Me Something Good," which goes "his bald head ringed with red hair, like a planet on fire." If the planet were on fire, which is impossible of course, but no matter the inane metaphor, the planet would be engulfed in fire, not ringed, which suggests a different, non-engulfing image. Or this trite simile from "Aubade with Burning City": "On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard for the first time." Every line of every poem sounds like it means something, until one actually dissects it and realizes there is nothing underneath the thick sentimentality. (One might also note that reviews rarely engage with the poems on a line-by-line basis, which would reveal their shallowness.) And every line is so overwrought as to be insincere: "For hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep." Vuong is almost thirty; that previous example is not what I consider to be worthy of a so-called emerging poet.

Though Vuong is not emerging. This is his third book if we count his two chapbooks, which we should because they are not much slimmer than this collection. I don't think Vuong will ever get better. He has his market--which I imagine overlaps with buyers of Thomas Kinkade paintings or Precious Moments figurines--and he is easily marketable (and exotifiable: publications love to make note of his unusual name and his concocted backstory, which often becomes the focus instead of the poems).

Anyway, recommended if you like poems that seem like they just peed themselves in the corner of the room.

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I didn't know the cost
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back.”

[Dannii Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual rating 4.5/5 stars.

"Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red trip wire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat."

This collection of poems piece together the history and tragedy of both the world, Vuong's family, and the poet themself. The gorgeous lyricism, when spoken aloud, is like honey on the tongue and scenes were captured with the merest of pen strokes. A redoubtable talent and a powerful voice that I will return to again and again. I hope to learn more about the history of some of these poems, to better understand their eloquence.

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué hermoso es Ocean Vuong!!! Tiene algo super triste, como una voz antigua que sale de todo lo que escribe, emotivo, duro, hermoso. Hay temáticas que toca en su novela, o autobiografía, que aparecen acá. Su familia, las historias super duras que vivieron, el amor, el deseo. Es bellísimo.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Night Sky with Exit Wounds is an invigorating, razor-sharp poetry collection that meditates with both candor and artistry on themes of war, nationality, sexuality, and violence. Vuong, born in Vietnam and raised in the US, threads details of his own family history into his broader narrative verse that centers on Vietnamese identity. It's a fierce, provocative, political, and sensual collection that I found both challenging and moving, and I'm looking forwarding to reading Vuong's debut novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous even more, now.

The type of review that just quotes a bunch of passages tends to be my least favorite to both read and write, but I'll break my own rule here because my own words feel rather inadequate next to these:

"How a horse will run until it breaks
into weather -- into wind. How like
the wind, they will see
him. They will see him
clearest
when the city burns."

- from Trojan

"Snow scraping against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

The city so white it is ready for ink."

- from Aubade with Burning City

"He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him."

- from Immigrant Haibun

"To love another
man -- is to leave
no one behind
to forgive me.
I want to leave
no one behind.
To keep
& be kept.
The way a field turns its secrets
into peonies.
The way light
keeps its shadow
by swallowing it."

- from Into the Breach

"Don't laugh. Just tell me the story / again, / of the sparrows who flew from falling Rome, / their blazed wings. / How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing"

- from Seventh Circle of Earth

[The Belladonna · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Dearest Father, forgive me for I have seen.

Forgive me for not twisting this tongue into the shape of Your name. For thinking: this must be how every prayer begins - the word Please cleaving the wind into fragments, into what a boy hears in his need to know how pain blesses the body back to its sinner.

Dearest Father, what becomes of the boy no longer a boy? Please - what becomes of the shepherd when the sheep are cannibals?”

-cut from- Prayer For The Newly Damned
🔥

[TJ ☾ · Rating 4 out of 5]

💫 song: navy blue - hasani

“Dearest Father, forgive me for I have seen.”



✨ fav poems:

🔹 a little closer to the edge
🌊 immigrant hiabun
🌀 headfirst
🦋 self-portrait as exit wounds
🪁 notebook fragments

[Jenna]

"There are seagulls above us. There are hands fluttering between the constellations, trying to hold on....

"Everyone can forget us -- as long as you remember."

-Ocean Vuong, from "Immigrant Haibun"

...

I admire Vuong's use of repetition, of theme and variation, in poems like "Threshold" and "Trojan." While I often gravitate toward more traditionally structured, more metrically restricted verse than Vuong's, I concede that it is exactly his preference for unmetered lines that allows him to use repetition to utmost effect: unlike in a traditionally structured poem like a villanelle, you never know in advance when -- or if -- a motif in a Vuong poem will recur, and it's this element of surprise, this element of organic timing, that enchants.

In addition to the poems I've already named, poems in this collection that positively surprised me include "Daily Bread" (I totally did not see the risky ending of this poem approaching).

Reading this book feels like being loved. Unlike some poems out there, Vuong's poems aren't mere defiances ("This is what I've lived, this is the way I see things, and I defy you to gainsay this, to hate this, to pick up the gauntlet I've dropped"), nor are they mere demonstrations of strength, of wit, of skill. Rather, they're full-blown interactive cinematic experiences that connect with you, the Reader; they let you in; they embrace. I think this is because this poet lives by surrounding himself with people he loves, and writing for people he loves. Reading his poems, you don't get the sense that he is one of those poets of fiction who lives alone in a lair, squinting at the world outside as though it were a sea-monster and poking at it from time to time with a long stick. Reading these poems makes me want to live a more loving life.

[iris ᵕ̈ · Rating 5 out of 5]

—He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.

absolutely life-changing and soul crushing.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through.”

“I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning.”

Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. A book about violence, identity, NY vs. Vietnam, sex, being gay, Grandma, living the legacy of Vietnam and the war (He was born in Saigon), and feels ecstatic, bursting with enthusiasm and reflecting pain. Fragmented, to reflect his fragmentation. I liked its energy and language and sass.

“. . . teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. . .”

Here’s one of his poems he reads and you can read along to:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

[leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

“some nights you are the light house / some nights the sea / what this means is that i don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt”

[zahraa al lawati · Rating 2 out of 5]

I might be dumb for this book.

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. We will never know how a boy emerges, so young, with a talent so great. A poem chosen at random lights deep, protected nodes in our brain and attaches to our viscera. We recognize his work as surely as we appreciate a painting, or a piece of music. He appears a conduit, not a creator.

One of the poems in this collection has a title referencing a Mark Rothko painting. Glancing at it, we know immediately why he pairs it with these words.

Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown, 1952)

The TV said the planes have hit the buildings.
& I said Yes because you asked me
to stay. Maybe we pray on our knees because god
only listens when we're this close
to the devil. There is so much I want to tell you.
How my greatest accolade was to walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge
& not think of flight. How we live like water: wetting
a new tongue with no telling
what we've been through. They say the sky is blue
but I know it's black seen through too much distance.
You will always remember what you were doing
when it hurts the most. There is so much
I need to tell you--but I only earned
one life & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth
at the end. The TV kept saying The planes...
The planes... & I stood waiting in the room
made of broken mockingbirds. Their wings throbbing
into four blurred walls. & you were there.
You were the window.

It was the phrase How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through. That phrase stopped me.

In an interview with The Guardian, Vuong says “life is always more complicated than the headlines allow; poetry comes in when the news is not enough.” Vuong won awards for this collection, and gained recognition. He now is an associate professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing a novel.

In an interview with Lit Hub Vuong explains

“I’m writing a novel composed of woven inter-genre fragments. To me, a book made entirely out of unbridged fractures feels most faithful to the physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being. I’m interested in a novel that consciously rejects the notion that something has to be whole in order to tell a complete story. I also want to interrogate the arbitrary measurements of a “successful” literary work, particularly as it relates to canonical Western values. For example, we traditionally privilege congruency and balance in fiction, we want our themes linked, our conflicts “resolved,” and our plots “ironed out.” But when one arrives at the page through colonized, plundered, and erased histories and diasporas, to write a smooth and cohesive novel is to ultimately write a lie.”

 Vuong brings with him the possibility of a vision that is articulate enough to share, brave enough to bolster. It's a kind of blessing, a grace note we don't really deserve, his voice.

Vuong’s poetry is available as an ebook from many libraries. He’s what we call a ‘literary light.’

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection has been recommended twice on the Reading Envy Podcast by readers I trust - Shawn (Episode 111) and Lauren (Episode 147) but I certainly took my time in getting to it.

Poems span from grappling with a father's experiences and a painful family/country history to the poet's own body and adulthood.

Favorites include "Telemachus," "A Little Closer to the Edge" (also see this video where the poet reads it,) "Into the Breach," "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," and "Logophobia."

I have an eARC of the poet's debut novel, also titled On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and I'm anxious to get to it.

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing, unforgettable, and a heart open in your hand. Vuong holds back nothing. This is one to reread and keep on the desk. To hold tight to the connection of why we write!

"When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above..."

"Depending on where you stand
your name can sound like a full moon
shredded in a dead doe's pelt.
Your name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. Why did we
keep saying Yes–
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real..."

Get this collection! You won't get closer to a heartbeat than this!

[Ci · Rating 1 out of 5]

people tell me he's good so i want to like Ocean Vuong. but i unfortunately don't get him

maybe multiple readings of this collection will benefit me better, but the first read went way over my head. some lyricism is stunning. but in general, i have no idea what this was.

[leynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note to self: If Orpheus was a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here. – from Notebook Fragments

There’s a photograph on the jacket of Ocean Vuong’s debut poetry collection of a small boy sitting on a wooden bench. Encircled by the arms of two women in summery cottons, he gazes steadily at the camera. The elegance is deceptive: it was taken when the family were living in poverty in a refugee camp in the Philippines, en route for the US, after being expelled from Vietnam. Vuong, the only child in the three-generation exodus, was two years old. A fellow refugee was bartering photographs for food. “That picture cost my family three tins of rice, according to my mother,” he says. “Each of us gave up our ration just to be seen.”

I bought Night Sky With Exit Wounds upon the recommendation of Shamina. I had never heard of Ocean Vuong, let alone this particular collection and was quite surprised to see that a bunch of my friends here on Goodreads have read it as well. I must’ve completely missed the “hype”. I found Vuong’s collection to be quite confusing. I can definitely see it improving upon a reread and upon researching more about him and his family history. Just reading some articles on him for this review, helped me understand his poems much better.

In his telling, Vuong’s life story begins two generations before he was born, when his American grandfather, a Michigan farm boy who “wanted to be Miles Davis”, joined the US navy with his trumpet in his backpack and was posted to Vietnam, where he fell in love with “an illiterate girl from the rice paddies”. This translates, in a piece called Notebook Fragments, as: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. / Yikes.”

By the time the family were reunited, his mother was an adult. She had given birth to Ocean when she was 18, and was washing men’s hair in a Saigon salon when a policeman realised that she was of mixed race and therefore working illegally under Vietnamese law. The whole family was evacuated to the Philippines while the Salvation Army processed their claim for admission to the US. After eight months in limbo they were moved on to Hartford, Connecticut, where Vuong’s father quickly disappeared, leaving him to be raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt.

His mother, a manicurist, gave him the name of Ocean. During a conversation with a customer, Vuong’s mother pronounced the word “beach” as “bitch”. The customer suggested she use the word “ocean” to substitute for “beach”. After learning the definition of the word ocean—as a body of water which connects the United States and Vietnam—she renamed him Ocean. [If we make it to shore, he says, I will name our son after this water. I will learn to love a monster.]

Favorites include “My Father Writes From Prison”, “In Newport I Watch My Father Lay His Cheek To A Beached Dolphin’s Wet Back”, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and “Daily Bread”. I just realised that those are all poems concerning his father, his search for a lost father figure. How can this collection be so full of fathers when Vuong grew up in a household of women? “Western mythology is so charged with the father,” he says. “Personally, I’m always asking who’s my father. Like Homer, I felt I’d better make it up. The Japanese have a word for it: yugen, when you have so little you have to imagine it.”

Overall, I am very happy that I checked out this poetry collection. I can definitely see myself reading more from Vuong in the future. [ For hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep. ]

// Book #5 for BTAT 2018!

[Akankshya (why are my comments limited) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked only about half of these.

Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven—waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through.

This collection proves contemporary poetry is still alive and that I'm too dumb for it. There is depth in many of the poems that I can perceive but can't appreciate. Vuong's brilliance in the ones I do is constructing the violence of war, family dynamics, and the remembrances of the past into the motifs of water and the night sky with beautiful lyricism. While I wouldn't highly applaud this collection as the critics and poetry enthusiasts are doing, I'd still clap politely.

The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

[Kyriaki]

Πριν διαβάσω το Στη γη είμαστε πρόσκαιρα υπέροχοι είπα να ρίξω μια ματιά σε αυτό, που γράφτηκε και πρώτο.
Θεωρώ ότι είναι πολύ καλή έκδοση, μόνο και μόνο από το γεγονός ότι είναι δίγλωσση (από την αριστερή πλευρά είναι το αγγλικό πρωτότυπο και από τη δεξιά η ελληνική μετάφραση/απόδοση).
Στα συν ότι έχει και μια εισαγωγή που προσωπικά βρήκα αρκετά βοηθητική.

Τώρα όσο αναφορά τα ποιήματα. Το κάθε ποίημα ήταν ξεχωριστό, μπορεί κάποια να μοιράζονταν κοινές θεματικές αλλά το κάθε ένα είχε τη δική του μορφολογία. Δεν χρησιμοποιούσε ιδιαίτερα πολύπλοκες ή εντυπωσιακές λέξεις, χωρίς όμως αυτό να σημαίνει ότι έφτιαχνε και απλές συνθέσεις. Δεν έπιανα κάθε φορά τι ήθελε να πει και δεν ταυτιζόμουν πάντα (πχ στα σημεία που είχαν να κάνουν με πόλεμο) είχε όμως και μερικά εξαιρετικά σημεία που διάβαζα ξανα και ξανά.
Μερικά από τα αγαπημένα μου (όχι με τη μορφολογία που έχουν κανονικά):

◽◽◽◽◽
If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming. The ship rocked as you swelled inside me: love's echo hardening into a boy. Sometimes I feel like an ambersand. I wake up waiting for the crush. Maybe the body is the only question an answer can't extinguish. How many kisses have we crashed to our lips in prayer – only to pick up the pieces?

◽◽◽◽◽
How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.

◽◽◽◽◽
Don't you know? A mother's love
neglects pride
the way fire
neglects the cries
of what it burns. My son,
even tomorrow
you will have today. Don't you know?

◽◽◽◽◽
My son, tell them
the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.

◽◽◽◽◽
The body was made soft
to keep us
from loneliness.

◽◽◽◽◽
Maybe we pray on our knees because god
only listens when we’re this close
to the devil.

◽◽◽◽◽
Turn back & find the book I left
for us, filled
with all the colors of the sky
forgotten by gravediggers.
Use it.
Use it to prove how the stars
were always what we knew
they were: the exit wounds
of every
misfired word.

◽◽◽◽◽
Don't worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets.

◽◽◽◽◽
Don't be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing.

◽◽◽◽◽
The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed.

◽◽◽◽◽
& remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.


Δεν είναι πολύ συνηθισμένη να διαβάζω ποίηση και μερικές φορές όταν ξεκινάω μια ποιητική συλλογή ξεχνιέμαι και διαβάζω λες και είναι μυθιστόρημα, αλλά φυσικά αυτό δε λειτουργεί ποτέ. Ούτε και εδώ λειτούργησε, οπότε μετά την πρώτη απόπειρα(δεν καταλάβαινα τίποτα) το πήρα ξανά από την αρχή, πήρα το χρόνο μου, χωρίς να βιάζομαι να το τελειώσω. Και πήγε καλά, πολύ καλά! Σίγουρα ξεχώρισα κάποια, όλα όμως τα βρήκα όμορφα, κυρίως γιατί ήταν τόσο συναισθηματικά, προσωπικά και αληθινά.
Και αφού το διάβασα, έκατσα και έψαξα και λίγο, διάβασα/είδα κάποιες συνεντεύξεις/readings που μιλούσε για τα θέματα που τον απασχολούν συγγραφικά, εξηγούσε και κάποια πράγματα, διάβαζε και κάποια από τα ποιήματα, γενικά ωραία τα έλεγε, ήταν πολύ ευχάριστό να τον ακούς να μιλάει.
Πολύ ωραία η πρώτη εντύπωση, έμεινα πολύ ικανοποιημένη και ξεκινάω αμέσως το Στη γη είμαστε πρόσκαιρα υπέροχοι.



-----
Η μετάφραση/απόδοση ήταν συμπαθητική θα έλεγα, σίγουρα υπήρχαν κάποια σημεία που με ξένιζαν και γενικά τις περισσότερες φορές προτιμούσα το πρωτότυπο, κατανοώ παρ'όλα αυτά τις επιλογές του μεταφραστή. Εκτός από ένα πράγμα. Στο πρωτότυπο ο Vuong δεν χρησιμοποιεί ποτέ την λέξη “and”, βάζει πάντα “&” και δεν καταλαβαίνω γιατί αυτό δεν έγινε και στην μετάφραση, αλλά προτιμήθηκε το “και”. Και εκτός αυτού, σε κάποιο σημείο(πρώτο απόσπασμα πιο πάνω) στο πρωτότυπο ενώ γράφει “ambersand” ο μεταφραστής αποφασίζει να το γράψει “&”.
Δεν μπορώ να καταλάβω.